British childrens' TV is under threat, but an organisation comprising many media professionals, Save Kids TV, is out to save it.
They recently released a video promoting their campaign which you can view on their web site, but now it's also been adapted as a comic for mobile to complement it, which features on the ROK Comics service.
Comics are a great, fast way to deliver a campaigning message. Perhaps there are other organisations out there who want to give it a try.
News that Jeff Hawke is soon to feature on ROK Comics has been welcomed by none other than David Jones MP, Member of Parliament for Clwyd West; Shadow Minister for Wales.
Jones is a longtime fan of the science fiction character created by Syd Jordan and published by the Daily Express, revealing "Jeff Hawke was a staple of my childhood. It appeared in the Daily Express from 1955 to 1974 and was years ahead of its time" and describes the strip as "among the most intelligent sci-fi comic strips ever produced, significantly better than much that was published in America, the home of the genre, at that time.
"Hawke dealt intelligently with moral issues in a futuristic setting and was often astonishingly prescient," Jones notes. "In 1959, the strip portrayed a memorial stone on the Moon, recording the first manned landing on “August Fourth, Earth Year Nineteen Hundred Sixty-Nine”. Neil Armstrong in fact set foot on the lunar surface on 21 July, 1969, just two weeks earlier."
"I am now seriously tempted to subscribe to the Rok service," Jones declares.
ROK Comics is pleased to announce a partnership with Look and Learn Ltd. to bring its extensive archive of classic British comics to mobile phones. In addition, as we reported in July, Look and Learn is making its extensive image archive available to ROK Comics’ parent company, ROK Media, to offer as mobile phone wallpapers via www.fonepark.com.
ROK Comics aims to adapt some of the most outstanding comics from Look and Learn, Jack and Jill, Playhour, Swift and Robin for mobile presentation, bringing the stunning art and stories from the comics to a whole new audience around the globe, working with over 30 selected telecom partners.
The first strip to be adapted for mobile phones is Robin Hood which was written by Clifford Makin and drawn by Frank Bellamy (who went on to draw Dan Dare for Eagle, Thunderbirds for TV21, Garth for the Daily Mirror and Doctor Who illustrations for the Radio Times). The Robin Hood strip originally appeared in Swift in 1956-57 and is the first of a number of Frank Bellamy strips ROK Comics is to publish.
The adapted comics are available for purchase at www.rokcomics.com and wap.rokcomics.com via Multi Media Message delivery to any MMS-capable phone on almost any network worldwide.
Laurence Heyworth, Publisher of Look and Learn, said: “Viewed on mobile phone, these comic strips and images have great retro appeal. We are delighted that this material is now being used in ways that could only have been dreamed of by its creators.”
"Robin Hood looks as fresh today as when it first appeared," says ROK Comics Managing Editor John Freeman, formerly an editor at Marvel UK and Titan Magazines. "We feel sure that this strip will capture the imaginations of today's mobile users.”
(You will need a mobile phone capable of receiving MMS to view the Robin Hood comic strip. The first episode can be viewed free on the site.)
• Look and Learn was Britain's most successful illustrated children's educational magazine, running between 1962 and 1982 for over a thousand issues. Throughout the 1960s, the magazine regularly sold several hundred thousand copies a week in the United Kingdom and around the world. During its 20 year run, it incorporated eight other magazines, including TheChildren's Newspaper (1919-65) and Ranger (1965-66), before itself coming to an end.
When Look and Learn closed it left behind a treasure trove of material which was to lie largely forgotten for nearly a quarter of a century. In late 2004 a new company was set up to acquire from IPC Media the rights to Look and Learn and the magazines that were incorporated into it (excluding some comic strips), together with what remained of the archive of original artwork. Since then, a small team has tracked down much more of the artwork, so that the company now owns many thousands of the paintings used in the magazine; it has also been able to borrow thousands more paintings from the Illustration Art Gallery, the leading dealer in this field, for scanning and incorporation into the digital archive.
As well as re-assembling the archive of original artwork, the team has written a history of Look and Learn, compiled biographies of the major illustrators, digitised the magazine and much of the artwork and created a website and on-line picture library. It has also digitised the entire run of The Children’s Newspaper, an issue of which is being re-published every day at www.lookandlearn.com.
In May 2006, the company acquired, again from IPC Media, rights to a number of nursery papers published at the same time as Look and Learn, including Jack and Jill (1954-85), Playhour (1954-87), Swift (1954-63) and Robin (1953-69), each of which sold several hundred thousand copies a week during the 1960s.
Look and Learn is currently publishing a limited series of 48 issues of a new magazine made out of the best of the original magazine.
On 6 September 2007 Century/Random House is publishing The Bumper Book of Look and Learn, a lavishly illustrated tribute to the magazine.
Various images from British magazines such as Bible Story and Look and Learn and other associated titles are now available as wallpapers for mobile phones, produced under license from Look and Learn by ROK Media.
ROK Comics creator David Reddick David Reddick has written a heartfelt column for the official www.startrek.com website, titled "I love Star Trek fans."
"After appearing for a second year as a special guest at Creation Entertainment's official Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, along with such Trek luminaries as William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Kate Mulgrew and Wil Wheaton to name a few, and having seen both sides of fandom from a fan's perspective, and a guest's perspective, I wrote the tribute regarding my feelings towards my fellow fans," he explains, "and the deeper root of that fandom, philosophies and love of Star Trek."
David, who offers his own strip Reddickulous via ROK Comics, is now a frequent special guest of Star Trek and sci-fi conventions around the country, meeting and drawing for fans, and talking on stage about his ever-popular comic strip The Trek Life, experiences and fandom.
The Trek Life centres on Carl, Kate and Steve, three Star Trek fans at different levels of fandom. A new strip appears every Monday on startrek.com's homepage and is also a regular feature in the official Star Trek Magazine from Titan Publishing, appearing in bookstores worldwide, and is now featured as a regular full-page back-up feature in IDW Publishing's line of officially licensed Star Trek comic books.
The first The Trek Life chibi manga strips are set to be released in Tokyopop's Star Trek: The Manga, Volume 2, in September 2007, joining work by Wil Wheaton and Diane Duane, to name a few.
Additionally, a new line of The Trek Life wallpapers will soon be available through CBS Mobile, at www.cbsmobile.com, in their ever popular Star Trek section.
"The strip has even stepped into the real-word," David reveals. "One of the strip's characters, Kate Stevens, has her very own real-world column called "Ask Kate," where she answers questions and offers advice on everything Trek, as well as love, life, and all things in-between."
One interesting thing coming out of comics fandom and creator reaction to comics on mobile phones has been a strident defence of print comics, as though comics on mobile will somehow put an end to them. This of course is not the case: in fact, we have plans to do more to promote print comics down the line anhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifd we always saw mobile comics, like web comics, as a means to complement print comics (and web comics, come to that).
The other major point about this is that in some countries where ROK Comics is setting up WAP comics subscriber-only sites with telecom partners, like Pakistan, print comics are not big business, but comic reader numbers are still huge, largely reading strops via newspapers. PC use is also low compared with mobile phones, making even more sense to develop the delivery of comics to mobile there.
It also means that we can promote some independent creators creations alongside more well known licensed content, offering a platform for their work they may previously not had. Hopefully that's a big plus 9as well as the potential revenue stream for their work).
Today's Times newspaper carries a feature on mobile comics, and highlights ROK Comics' operation. "The comic book, a staple of British childhood for 90 years, is to receive a 21st-century makeover as the adventures of characters such as Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan are sent frame-by-frame to children’s mobile phones," it begins, drawing comparisons with how mobile comics have developed in Japan. (Papyless, a Tokyo-based specialist in electronic books, made $17 million - £8.5 million - in the year to March, more than double the previous year).
DC Thomson are among many comics publishers looking for a means to deliver comics to mobile phones - the very service ROK Comics offers comics companies worldwide already being exploited by the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, Look and Learn, Broken Voice, Markosia and others.
Comics writer and columnist Rich Johnston, who specialises in the comic books industry and writes a regular column, Lying in the Gutters, for comics news site Comic Book Resources, tells the Times he predicted that mobile phones would become a popular medium. “The principal audience for comic books is young people, who are much more used to reading things in digital form,” he says. “Screen sizes are getting larger, and devices like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP are ideal for viewing images on.”
The feature mentions ROK's offering of Look and Learn Ltd's Robin Hood and Mike Colbert's Crazy Mary strip.
You can read the full feature online here (subscription may be required after seven days).
With our ROK Comics humour competition to win $10K now in its final days (and is it going to be hard to judge!), here's some news of another competition (its deadline 26 August), courtesy of Josh Roberts, who runs the terrific comics web site comicspace - if you want to track down your favourite comic creators, try here!
Vancouver-based effects company Rainmaker Entertainment is working with Zeros 2 Heroes to bring back the classic ReBoot television series. As part of this campaign, Zeros 2 Heroes will be creating a new comic based on ReBoot.
Here's the twist: the art team will be picked solely from online submissions: essentially users upload a sketch, painting, even lettering work for one of the ReBoot characters. These sketches are then voted on by the ReBoot fans, with the winners being called on to make up the art team.
So, it's an unpaid audition, but it will be a paid gig starting in September. The winner will be announced at FanExpo in Toronto on August 26th.
If you've got the time/interest, here's how to get involved:
(1) Go to www.zeros2heroes.com and join the site. (2) The ReBoot pitches are found here (http://live.zeros2heroes.com/content/view/87/118/) - you need to be logged in. (3) Launch the Flash viewer by clicking on any of the pitch thumbnails. (4) Browse through the pitches and pick the CHARACTER or WORLD you think is the most interesting (5) Upload a sketch using the UPLOAD button
If you haven't got the time to get involved in this process (or you don't really think ReBoot is your thing), no problem. But you may want to join the site anyway... Zeros 2 Heroes will be hiring a LOT of artists in the next few months to work on a number of upcoming projects.
I'm pleased to report Markosia has joined the growing number of publishers on ROK Comics. There will be a fuller press item later but in the mean time, here's the first episode of "Dark Mists", an adventure set in pre-war Japan...
ROK Comics creator Chris Reynolds is working on a new Moon Queen strip that will appear on the comics-to-mobile project. Titled "Moon Queen in Las Vegas: The Moon Queen's Greatest Tragedy", we'll let you know when it launches.
Chris is the author of the seminal graphic novel Mauretania first published by Penguin Books, and his Adventures From Mauretania (available from lulu.com) was voted as one of the best comics of 2006 in the Comics Journal.
Chris also tells us that on 16 November he and Paul Harvey are planning an exhibition, "The Newcastle Stuckists Celebrate the Mauretania" as it will be the Centenary of the maiden voyage of the ship the comic was named after.
"We plan to have paintings and comic artwork by me and Paul," says Chris. More details as we get them.
Stuckism is a radical and controversial art group that was co-founded in 1999 by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish (who left in 2001) along with eleven other artists. The name was derived by Thomson from an insult to Childish from his ex-girlfriend, Brit artist Tracey Emin, who had told him that his art was 'Stuck'.
Stuckists are pro-contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts. Stuckists have regularly demonstrated dressed as clowns against the Turner Prize. Several Stuckist Manifestos have been issued. One of them Remodernism inaugurates a renewal of spiritual values for art, culture and society to replace the emptiness of current Postmodernism.
The web site www.stuckism.com, started by Ella Guru, has disseminated these ideas, and in five years Stuckism has grown to an international art movement with over 100 groups round the world. These groups are independent and self-directed.
The Sporting Swine by Barney Farmer and Lee Healey, which first appeared in top men's magazine Maxim, is the latest professional strip to join the many others on ROK Comics from some of the UK's top comic creators.
The Sporting Swine has appeared in Maxim since around June 2005, initially in the UK only, then various European editions - including the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.
At the moment it appears, sporadically, in the US edition.
Barney and Lee are the team behind the critically acclaimed Drunken Bakers which appears in Viz magazine, which leading comic creator Alan Moore once described as "horrible" but "really funny" and Roberta Smith of the New York Times praised for "the aesthetic compression of Mr Farmer's dialogue and Mr Healey's Iine," which she said "convey an oppressive sense of the drinker's irresistable drive for oblivion."
"The characters came along January 2003 in an ill-fated strip called ‘Meat, the Wife’ Lee and I pitched at Viz," explains writer Barney Farmer. "It was sort of a dig at that anthropomorphistic comedy which has hung around like a bad smell ever since it was both made popular then mined to completion by Gary Larson in The Far Side.
"By 2003 this concept had reached a point where a tedious stand-up or sit-com character could say 'I saw a dog sharpening some pencils today' or 'What if monkeys opened bank accounts?' and expect, at worst, a reflex snigger.
"Anyhow, this non-Viz strip was about one man’s futile and infuriating attempts to drum human ways into his sow of a wife. The first (and only) strip had him slowly, surely bursting a spleen as she failed to comprehend the telephone. Wouldn’t even pick it up."
Neither did Viz, and the pair only came to mind again early 2005 when Greg Gutfeld, then editor of Maxim, asked us to come up with a more light-hearted strip for the magazine to go alongside their other strip Adventures of a Widower.
"I'm not sure how many we've done so far," says Barney, "But the best is the baseball one."
You can view a free sample of The Sporting Swine on ROK Comics below.
Just back from the San Diego Comic Convention where he has been busy promoting Crazy Mary, available via ROK Comics, creator Michael Colbert tells me the first print version of the story will be released in the US in November through Digital Webbing Presents.
Around the same time, Dimestore Productions is releasing an anthology of comic stories which includes another of Mike's stories, Krane, and Imperium Comics is looking at another short he wrote (with all the art already done) called Golem for their Trailer Park of Terror title.
Most importantly, says Mike, "I just bought a 12 inch tall radio controlled talking Dalek at comicon and I chase my dog around with it!" It's always good to have a hobby!
